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In the still of the night

The title of this post only has a little bit to do with what I want to talk about. Usually when I’m blogging I try and think of a headline either beforehand or at the same time (which is actually contrary to when I’m working, I normally hate doing headlines) and the title of this song came into my head.

As I thought about the actual song though, I realized it doesn’t actually have a lot to do with what I’m getting to (like I said), but I thought I could try and embed the song too, and that could be fun.

So here’s the song:

And here’s what I actually want to talk about:

Growing up, the radio was always playing in our house. Always always always. It’s the first thing my parents do when they get up in the morning, and it’s the way my mom used to get my brother (and sometimes me) out of bed in the morning for school, by cranking the radio so loud there wasn’t a hope that we could roll over and ignore it. I always thought it was weird when I went over to friends’ houses and their house was quiet, with no radio playing.

When we did our cross-country road trips in the summer, there was always music playing. Either whatever radio station we could pick up from the town we were going through or tapes that my dad had made previous to leaving Calgary. We only had a tape deck in his ’92 Ford pickup truck, and later we had an adapter for a CD player and mp3, but I remember him sitting on the living room floor, transferring his CDs to tapes so we could listen to them in the truck. This explains a little bit about why I could sing Neil Young’s Rocking in the Free World and Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car by the time I was four.

The habit has continued with me. The radio in my car is always on, and I don’t switch radio channels like some people who start flipping as soon as a commercial comes on. The only time I flip the radio off is if Aerosmith’s Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing comes on. At my parents’ house, the minute I went into my room, I would flip on the radio. Since I’ve moved out though, I notice I don’t always turn on the radio.

Which is weird, I mean, as you can see, the radio as background noise has always been there for me. And living alone especially, you’d think that I’d want that background noise, since there’s no one else around.

Sometimes though, it’s nice to have the quiet.

And in case you were wondering, that version of In the Still of the Night is by Quintessential, an a cappella group from Calgary. I actually don’t know if they’re around anymore, one of the tenors was the marching band instructor at my high school and the group sometimes made appearances at our concerts; they hosted the band’s 40th anniversary concert, things like that. I honestly want to say I don’t think they’re around anymore, V. alone, the marching band instructor, has gotten married, had two kids and is still basically running the marching band program at Grandin. He’s still crazy passionate about music, but I find his teaching style has changed a bit, which I find extremely weird and don’t necessarily like as much. Oh well.